Eur. Phys. J. B 77, 523-531 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-10500-7

Two-dimensional ranking of Wikipedia articles

¹ Novosibirsk State University, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia
² Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia
³ Laboratoire de Physique Théorique du CNRS, IRSAMC, Université de Toulouse, UPS, 31062 Toulouse, France

Corresponding author: ^a dima@irsamc.ups-tlse.fr

Received: 28 June 2010
Revised: 20 September 2010
Published online: 20 October 2010

Abstract

The Library of Babel, described by Jorge Luis Borges, stores an enormous amount of information. The Library exists ab aeterno. Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia, becomes a modern analogue of such a Library. Information retrieval and ranking of Wikipedia articles become the challenge of modern society. While PageRank highlights very well known nodes with many ingoing links, CheiRank highlights very communicative nodes with many outgoing links. In this way the ranking becomes two-dimensional. Using CheiRank and PageRank we analyze the properties of two-dimensional ranking of all Wikipedia English articles and show that it gives their reliable classification with rich and nontrivial features. Detailed studies are done for countries, universities, personalities, physicists, chess players, Dow-Jones companies and other categories.